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Adblock Plus parent Eyeo is buying Flattr, the micropayents service created by Pirate Bay founder Peter Sunde, as the ad-blocking service looks to revolutionise the way customers pay for online content.

Flattr was co-founded by Sunde in 2010 and began collaborating with Adblock Plus last year by launching Flattr Plus, an add-on for web browsers enabling automatic payments to publishers from a single account.

The companies are hoping the ease of payment – which eliminates the need to enter bank details more than once – will catch on as a content funding solution.

The two companies had aimed to reach ten million users by this year but did not comment today on how popular Flattr Plus had been since the collaboration was launched last May. However, it said 30,000 online content creators and publishers have been using the service since it was created seven years ago.

The core team of the original Flattr company will continue its operations with all staff members from Malmö, Sweden. Sunde will act as advisor and his co-founder Linus Olsson will continue to head operation and implementation.

Till Faida, founder of Eyeo, said: "Over the past several months, it became very clear that we needed to go beyond a partnership and truly bring Flattr into the Eyeo family.

"This allows us to go that extra mile and finalise our vision of enabling hundreds of millions of users to choose how they want to pay for the content they consume. This is a game-changer."